Each month, Jason Fortner spotlights one or more musical theatre composers and/or lyricists, offering his own unique perspective on the songwriting legends of musical theatre. Send your comments/questions on this column to happgood@aol.com.

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This month we look at some of those unique musical theater scores that sound so wonderful on CD that those that missed the original productions can't understand how these shows failed. These deceptive CDs make for great listening, in some cases much more entertaining than sitting through the original flawed stage productions.

Many a theater company has tried to salvage the tarnished track record of these shows by re-thinking, re-inventing, re-setting them, often with mixed results. These are scores I love to LISTEN to, but have often been challenged when asked to watch them actually performed, especially in amateur productions.

THE BAKER'S WIFE - This is by far my favorite score by Stephen Schwartz, be it on the original studio cast recording starring Patti Lupone, Paul Sorvino, and Kurt Peterson or the highly expanded two CD London cast recording. The writing is delightful, the tunes lilting, and the story a bore to most modern audiences. Based on the 1940 film by Marcel Pagnol, this musical died on the road to NY back in 1976, causing star Topol to jump off the sinking ship before it had a chance to completely sink. Many have analyzed this flop show trying to fix its problems, but I think the main challenge is that it is basically a delicate little love triangle and no amount of expanding can make it a "big" Broadway style musical. The score, however, is a delight to hear on CD and highly recommended listening, revealing Schwartz in a much more traditional Broadway style than his earlier scores for GODSPELL, PIPPIN and THE MAGIC SHOW. [Schwartz, on his website, says that the rewrites done for the recent Papermill Playhouse version of the show were the final variation and now the show "works" for him. I have not seen this variation so I can't comment on the recent improvements.]

MY FAVORITE YEAR - When this CD hit the show tune lovers market everybody yelped "how could it only run a month in New York?," but anyone who saw the show at Lincoln Center could definitely explain its' shortcomings. The score is delightful, featuring terrific work by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, but like their earlier work-shopped LUCKY STIFF, the show just didn't work for New York audiences. On stage the show sagged and dragged between numbers, and even during the songs it often suffering from pedestrian choreography that did nothing to enhance the score. But the CD is terrific, inspiring many a community theater production in venues that can afford to take a chance with adding a short run of a lesser known show to a full season. My theory on this show is that in listening to the CD you create grander pictures in your head than can be achieved on an actual stage, or at least have been up to this date.

MACK & MABEL - Anyone who knows me knows this is my all time favorite musical theater CD, the top of my "desert island" CD list. The score by Jerry Herman (his personal favorite) is a joy from the first note to the last, eliciting pathos, passion and laughs and the performances by Bernadette Peters, Robert Preston and Lisa Kirk are unsurpassed. That being said, the show is a problematic one to produce, chiefly due to the fact that fifty percent of the title characters are dead before the finale, and this after a downward spiral into drugs, booze and scandal. Musicals based on real life characters often pose problems, especially since real life doesn't always follow musical theater timing in neat little two act pieces. Mr. Herman has overseen a few different reproductions of this flawed show, each one promising to right the wrongs of the prior incarnations, but ultimately never adding up to the sum of its parts, alas. Will I go see it if I see it listed on a schedule? Yes! Will it completely work? Probably not, but aficionados like me can derive great joy from it nonetheless. [A lot of the interest in this score by the general public came from Ice Skating team Torvill & Dean's use of the recording's overture as a competition performance piece. This exposure caused sales of the album to skyrocket in the UK and this interest inspired the 1988 London concert, the ill-fated 1994 London production of the show and the new West End 11 member cast actor/musician production.

MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG - This is the infamous 16 performance Stephen Sondheim flop with a cast recording that soars so highly that no one who hears it can comprehend the short life span of this show on Broadway. Tuneful, clever, sharp, poignant and mesmerizing, this show on stage suffers from a plethora of maladies, among them the need for a teenage cast (at least in the first production), a story that spans decades, a plot that begins bitterly and ends warmly, and the biggest problem of all - it all moves backwards. No matter how you slice it, as my friend Susan says, "It's STILL backwards" and that is a problem for most theater audiences, even the educated ones. [This was my LEAST favorite show at the Kennedy Center Sondheim Celebration a few years back, chiefly due to improvements that did not improve the material, in my humble opinion.] Over the years I've seen this show written and rewritten again, performed in concert and "re-thought" over and over again, and yet I can't help thinking it still plays best as a CD, featuring those fresh faced teens in sweatshirts proclaiming their roles and relationships, giving their all in the studio, knowing their big "debut" was short-lived. Get the CD, and DON'T play it backwards!

PARADE / THE LAST FIVE YEARS - Jason Robert Brown is one of the many "sons of Sondheim" writers with a strong fan base and no major success in New York (see Andrew Lippa, Michael John LaChiusa, Adam Guettel et. al.) His scores for both PARADE, the retelling of the Leo Frank trial and lynching in Georgia, and THE LAST FIVE YEARS, a quasi-autobiographical look at the disintegration of a relationship from two differing timelines, play wonderfully as recordings but suffered greatly on stage. PARADE had issues of tone and staging, something the swiftly moving CD easily fixes and places the score in its rightful place as the standout of this production, especially the performances of Brent Carver and Carolee Carmello. THE LAST FIVE YEARS suffers on stage from the lack of audience interest in watching a series of musical monologues unfold, again one of them with a backward timeline juxtaposed against a forward one. Sounds great on paper and plays well to those who are willing to do their homework, but alas most modern audiences are lazier than that. However, these CDs are great to listen to and enjoy, a true testament to JRB's talent.

STEEL PIER / 70, GIRLS, 70 - These two flops by John Kander & Fred Ebb feature great scores that were underappreciated in unfulfilling Broadway productions. STEEL PIER as a CD plays like lightning, keeping one great show song after another coming in rapid succession. On stage, despite Susan Stroman's incredible dance marathon choreography, the convoluted ghost pilot plot and various subplots only muddled and weakened the evening. [Had they been able to get the rights to THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY as intended, they might have had a hit.] 70 GIRLS 70 suffered from book troubles aplenty, the worst being the conceit that the characters on stage were ACTORS in a Broadway show playing RESIDENTS of an old age home, causing a definite weakening of any dramatic momentum in favor of backstage schtick. The score however is delightful, and plays well as a CD or in concert form. Both of these shows are testaments to the superb Broadway sensibilities of Kander & Ebb…Their contributions will be missed!

ANYONE CAN WHISTLE / BOUNCE - Stephen Sondheim is my favorite Broadway writer, bar none. His work speaks to me in ways that nobody else's can. These two flops are on opposite ends of his composer/lyricist career, yet both are similar in many ways. They are both musical comedies, a form that has made a minor comeback in recent years but was missing from Broadway for a decade or so thanks to the so-called "British Invasion." ANYONE CAN WHISTLE was the infamous 9 performance flop that had everyone actually seen it that claimed to have, it would have run for years! [I was but two years old at the time and make no such claim.] The story of a bankrupt town that needs a miracle, it starred Angela Lansbury (in her pre-MAME Broadway musical debut), Lee Remick and Harry Guardino (as Dr. Hapgood, my online namesake). The plot, crazy as it may seem, is about conformity versus non-conformity and the basis for who is really sane or insane in this modern world. The recording is "brilliant" as Cora would say, and worth the purchase just for the 11 minute "Simple" sequence alone. BOUNCE may be Sondheim's last score for Broadway, and unfortunately it never made it there, dying in Washington DC after a troubled start in Chicago. Based on the true story of Addison & Wilson Mizner, the show was workshopped as WISE GUYS, morphed into GOLD! and then became BOUNCE for its final version. The story of two ne'er do well brothers chasing the American dream, it is a sprawling tale encompassing various decades and locations, all very hard to show on stage. I saw the show in both Chicago and Washington and never felt it really worked as a theatrical story, but I love the CD, nonetheless.

CANDIDE - This is the one that started it all…Even though its initial Broadway run of 73 performances was flop worthy, Goddard Lieberson of Columbia Records insisted on recording this landmark score with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Richard Wilbur, John Latouche and Dorothy Parker. Featuring Barbara Cook (in her incredible Glitter and Be Gay coloratura aria) Robert Rounseville, Irra Petina, and Max Adrian this album immediately became a theater score lover's must-have item. Over the years the album has inspired TV themes (The Dick Cavett show), orchestral repertoires, inclusion in opera house seasons, Broadway revivals and concert versions. Bernstein himself never stopped working on the show, contributing his own additional lyrics for subsequent versions and getting his pal Stephen Sondheim to write new lyrics for the 1973 Chelsea Theater environmental production. But after all that work, the show is still unwieldy and problematic, working best as a recording or concert piece. [and no TWO productions are alike, either.] The fault, I believe, goes back to the Voltaire novel, a sprawling epic meant to satirize the follies and morals of everything from the Spanish Inquisition to the search for gold in the New World. However you package it, though, this is a score that refuses to die, and like Candide & Cunegonde it just keeps coming back for more!